12. Cassian
CASSIAN
My day begins at four. I am up because I am always up before a Vance dinner, and I am in my study at the desk by the window because that is where I work when I am working a thing I cannot afford to lose.
The folder for the evening is open in front of me.
The folder has not been touched in eight hours.
I am, in fact, looking at the folder the way a man looks at a book he has already read.
She is going to be fine.
This is the new sentence. I am not used to the new sentence.
The old sentence — the sentence I have been telling myself for thirteen years on every dinner of consequence — is you have prepared for this and you will execute.
The new sentence is she is going to be fine.
The new sentence is, I am noticing, not about me.
Sebastian comes in at five with the morning briefing and a pot of coffee, and he stops at the threshold the way he does when he is reading the room before he speaks.
"You're already up."
"You're observant, Sebastian."
"You're in a mood."
"I'm in my study."
"I have known you to be in your study and not in a mood. They are not, technically, the same condition."
"Set the coffee down."
He sets the coffee down. He pours. He does not leave.
"What."
"Vance's office called. They've asked if your fiancée would be available for a brief tour of the lower property before dinner. Becca, specifically. She'd like — and I am quoting from the email — the unvarnished concierge perspective on guest flow."
I stop with the cup halfway to my mouth.
"Becca."
"Mm."
"Becca asked for Maren by name."
"By function. The phrase was your fiancée, who I understand started in operations."
"Mm."
"What would you like me to tell her, sir."
I set the cup down.
"Tell her yes. Pull Maren up at three. Walk-through at four. Loop the dinner team in on the timing — I want the cocktail hour pushed to six fifteen so she has thirty minutes between."
"Done."
"And Sebastian."
"Sir."
"Have someone bring her a sandwich at three thirty. She doesn't eat when she's nervous. Something with bread, not — not one of those plates the kitchen does where it's three vegetables and a foam."
"A sandwich."
"A sandwich."
"Yes, sir."
He writes it down. He writes it down without comment, which is the first warning I have, although I do not yet understand it as a warning, because I am drinking my coffee and thinking about a sandwich.
At three-thirty, Becca Lin steps in wearing a navy suit and a calm, unblinking smile—fresh off a colder runway, if the look of her is any indication. She’s short, famously dangerous, and accepts a glass of water without loosening her grip on her phone.
Maren comes down the stairs in cream linen.
Becca takes in the dress. Then she takes in me in the dress. And over her shoulder, Sebastian—who has somehow become the building’s second most reliable person in the last hour—gives the smallest tilt of his head toward me, his version of she’s ready.
"Ms. Lin."
"Becca, please."
"Maren."
"Maren. Thank you for indulging me. I told Cassian's office I wanted the operational view, and they were kind to make space."
"I'm — happy to. The grounds are easier to read in the daylight."
"That is, in fact, why I asked for four. You read me well."
She means it as a test. I see it. Maren sees it.
Maren — I would not have predicted this two weeks ago — does not flinch.
She inclines her head a fraction, a small acknowledgment of the move, and offers her arm to Becca like the ma?tre d' she has been for three years, and the two of them walk out toward the cliff path with Sebastian a discreet six steps behind.
I do not follow.
I do not follow because it is a tour and following would be ridiculous, and I do not follow because there is, currently, a working call I am scheduled to take with the legal team in forty minutes, and I do not follow because if I follow Becca will register that I am following and Becca will register why.
I sit at my desk. I open the call ten minutes early. I tell myself I am preparing.
I get up at three minutes in. I walk to the window.
I watch them—small, distant—moving along the lower lawn, Becca’s hand at the brim of her hat, Maren gesturing toward the lower spa wing, Sebastian following at the pace he’s trained into himself since I hired him: the exact distance from me that Maren is, right now, from Becca.
She gestures with her left hand. The diamond catches.
Becca laughs. I cannot hear the laugh from the window. I can see Becca's shoulders move — just once — in the small involuntary way a person laughs when she is not, in fact, performing.
I sit back down. The call has been going for eleven minutes without me. The legal team is, evidently, fine.
The dinner is at seven thirty in the long room with the cypress beams. I have been in this room a hundred times.
I have hosted, in this room, two of my marriages, three property closings, the funeral of a man who built half of the resort with his hands.
I do not, in this room, generally find the air difficult.
The air is, currently, difficult.
Maren is at the foot of the table — six chairs from me — and she is, by an order of magnitude, the youngest person in the room. She is also the person Roland Vance has chosen, before the soup, to ask his question of.
I see him do it. I see him set down his glass. I see him fold his hands. I see Becca, beside him, lift her wine and watch over the rim.
"Maren."
"Mr. Vance."
"Tell me what you do, with all this."
He gestures. He means the property. He means me. He means, what use is a woman like you in a life like his.
I do not breathe. I do not allow my face to do anything.
She tilts her head. She does the small considering thing she does when she is not, in fact, considering, when she has, in some chamber of her brain, already chosen the answer and is waiting the polite beat before she says it.
"I keep him from making the building too cold, Mr. Vance."
There is a small pause. Then he laughs. He laughs — not the polite laugh, not the courtesy laugh. The actual laugh, from the chest, the laugh I have heard him do twice in nine years of business.
"Cold."
"It is a beautiful resort, sir. It is, occasionally, a cold one.
The bones are good. The light is good. The staff is excellent.
But Cassian — and he will not be flattered to hear this — designs from the spreadsheet down.
I have been working in this building for three years.
Until him I worked at his property in Carmel.
The thing both buildings have in common is that they are gorgeous and they do not, on a Tuesday afternoon in November, know how to make a guest feel welcome.
So I do that. I make the building warmer than it knows how to be. "
Roland sets his glass down.
"That," he says, "is the best answer I have had to that question in twenty-two years."
Becca keeps her gaze elsewhere. She doesn’t need it; her mouth, behind her wine, does the small, considered thing it’s been doing all night.
I do not look at Maren. I cannot. If I look at Maren I will do something I cannot, currently, afford to do at this table, and I will do it in front of a man whose check I am asking for.
I lift my glass.
"To warm buildings."
"To warm buildings," Roland says.
The dinner moves on. The soup arrives.
Sebastian finds me on the lower terrace at one in the morning.
The dinner has been over for an hour. The Vance team has gone up.
Maren has gone up. The staff is quietly, professionally, dismantling the long table down the hall, and I am out here with a whiskey and an unlit cigar. I am, evidently, not going to smoke.
He comes out without asking. He pours himself two fingers from my decanter, which he is, in nine years, allowed to do precisely once a year, and he sits in the chair opposite mine.
"Roland's office sent the term sheet."
"Already."
"At twelve forty. Becca pushed it through. The pricing is better than your projections by a margin of four points."
"Mm."
"Sir."
"What."
"You moved the cocktail hour to six fifteen this evening."
"I did."
"Because she needed thirty minutes between the tour and the dinner."
"She did."
"You also told the kitchen to plate her quail with the figs off tonight, because you noticed at dinner two nights ago that she does not, actually, like figs."
"They were too sweet for the dish."
"You also rewrote the seating chart for the dinner from what I sent up at eleven this morning."
"Roland was on the wrong side of the light."
"Sir."
"Sebastian."
"I am not the man you pay to ask you this. But there is, currently, no other man on this property who is allowed to ask you this. So I am asking."
I drink my whiskey. My eyes stay on the water beyond the terrace, the thin dark line of it, the white pulse of a buoy marking the mouth of the cove.
"Ask the question, Sebastian."
"Are you all right?"
"That's the question?"
"That is the question."
I think about it.
I think about her at the foot of the table, saying lightly, I keep him from making the building too cold, and Roland Vance actually laughing into the scotch I’d instructed the bartender to leave unadorned.
I think about her hair at three-thirty, pinned with a gold clip I’d never seen, something she must have picked up in some town I’ll ask her about when I can bear to.
I think about Sebastian’s question. I have no answer for it.
"I will let you know," I tell him.
"Sir."
"I will let you know, Sebastian."
He drinks his whiskey. He sets the glass down with the small, deliberate care he uses when he’s already halfway out of a room. He stands.
"For what it's worth, sir."
"Mm."
"She was excellent tonight."
"I know she was."
"She is, as it happens, also very tired. She went up at twelve thirty. She did not eat the dessert."
"Sebastian."
"Sir."
"Go home."
He goes home. The terrace is mine. The whiskey is mine. The buoy at the mouth of the cove blinks on, blinks off, and does it again.
I do not move for a while. Then I stand.
Then I walk, without thinking about it, toward the stairs to my wing.
Toward her room. Not to go in. Just to listen, at the door, for the small, even sound of a person sleeping.
To confirm, in some way I am not yet ready to name, that she is, in fact, in this house tonight.
I am, I suspect, in trouble.
I cannot, currently, bring myself to mind.